"Economic independence is the foundation of the only sort of freedom worth a damn."
--H.L. Mencken.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Bitconnect has been under sustained DDoS attack for two days now, making the service inaccessible to users. It did come up briefly again last night, and behind the scenes all was proceeding as normal. Unfortunately the attack overwhelmed their servers again a short time later and it's back to being "offline."

While I'm stuck waiting along with everyone else to get back into my Bitconnect account, I've been exploring Hashflare, a "cloud mining" platform that provides access to powerful Bitcoin and alt coin mining operations through affordable one-year contracts. This is the "production" side of Bitcoin, as opposed to the trading side that Bitconnect represents.

As of now, given Bitcoin's price in USD and current "difficulty," a $2.20 USD one-year 10 gigahash/second contract through Hashflare would return roughly $6.02 over the term, a return of just about 274%. All that for not having to purchase, power, and operate mining equipment of my own. Not bad, huh?

One other thing attracting me to this platform is that I can purchase these contracts with a credit card. As I wrote about yesterday, I do not think anyone should use a credit card for this kind of thing and then carry the balance. What you should do is spend cash you actually have on-hand through a card and pay the balance immediately (or at least before the end of the following billing cycle, so as to avoid interest charges). Even better is to do this with a cash back rewards card, which can be used to offset some of the total cost and thus enhance your return (example: I use a card that offers 1.5% cash back, which if I apply the cash back to the balance reduces the cost of one of these contracts to $2.167 USD, boosting the annual return by nearly 4%).